Michael Maccoby

Michael Maccoby (March 5, 1933 – November 5, 2022) was an American psychoanalyst and anthropologist globally recognized as an expert on leadership for his research in improving organizations and the nature of work. He authored or co-authored fourteen books and consulted to companies, governments, the World Bank, unions, research and development centers and laboratories, universities and orphanages or taught in 36 countries. Maccoby's article, Narcissistic Leaders: the Incredible Pros, the Inevitable Cons written in January 2000, was awarded a McKinsey Award from the Harvard Business Review.

Life, education, and family
Maccoby was born in Mt. Vernon, New York, on March 5, 1933, to his father, who was a reform rabbi, and his mother who was a teacher. Maccoby attended public school in Mt. Vernon at the Brandes School in Tucson, Arizona, with the exception of two years. He graduated from A.B. Davis High School where he was awarded the General von Steuben Medal for Excellence in American History. He received a BA (magna cum laude) at Harvard University in 1954 where he was president of The Harvard Crimson. He then studied philosophy with Stuart Hampshire and Bernard Williams at New College, Oxford on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship.

As a graduate student at Harvard he was a teaching fellow and secretary to the Committee on Educational Policy at the faculty of Arts and Sciences. He received a PhD from Harvard in Social Relations (combining social psychology and personality with anthropology) in June 1960. At Harvard, he worked with David Riesman, Jerome Bruner, B.F. Skinner, and McGeorge Bundy, and also studied with the anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn. At the University of Chicago he studied with the anthropologist Robert Redfield and the psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim. While there he also studied Machiavelli with the political philosopher Leo Strauss. He married Sandylee Weille in 1959. Between 1960 and 1968 they lived in Mexico, while Maccoby worked with Dr. Erich Fromm.

Maccoby died from a heart attack in Washington, D.C., on November 5, 2022, at the age of 89. He was predeceased by his wife Sandylee Weille (d.2019); they had 4 children, Annie Maccoby-Berglof, Nora Maccoby-Hathaway, Izette Maccoby Folger, and Max Maccoby.